The long delay of the Democratic Left Party on Immigration: NPR

When bipartisan discussions on immigration emerge, Democrats often insist that it is difficult to find a solution because of the GOP's changing immigration. At the time Ronald Reagan had approved an amnesty program and denounced the walls, he has long since been replaced by President Trump's remarks about "rapists" and the quest for a wall.

But the reality is that the Democrats have passed, since the party was citing the flow of drugs and "criminal immigrants" two decades ago, to the same arguments that Republicans are now using for border security. The facts on the ground have changed since, but the political forces too.

The composition of the Democratic Party has changed and its base has adopted a fundamentally more progressive attitude towards immigration in a relatively short period of time, which is a challenge for party leaders.

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In 1994, 32% of Democrats said that immigrants strengthened the country through their efforts and talents. Today, 83% of Democrats are of this opinion, according to a poll of the Pew Research Center.

During the same period, the percentage of Democrats who said that immigrants were a burden to the country because they held jobs, their housing and their health care had decreased by about 50%.

Today, the consensus among Democrats is unanimous: immigrants are an asset and not a threat to national security. Immigration reform should therefore focus on humanitarian concerns and not on border controls.

President Trump attacks the Democrats as an "open borders" party. Although Democrats decry this label, leaders must strike a balance when they talk about "border security", with the party's base shifted to the left.

The Clinton years

In his 1996 State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton proudly told Congress: "After years of neglect, this administration has taken a firm stand to strengthen the protection of our borders ".

Clinton, as part of his overall program of law enforcement, sought to clamp down on illegal immigration.

Here is a paragraph from the platform of the Democratic Party of 1996:

Today's democratic party also believes that we must remain a nation of laws. We can not tolerate illegal immigration and we must put an end to it. For years before Bill Clinton became president, Washington spoke loudly but did not act. In 1992, our borders may also not exist. The border was under patrol and whatever the patrols, they were under-equipped. The drugs flowed freely. Illegal immigration was endemic. Criminal immigrants, expelled after committing crimes in America, returned the next day to commit crimes again.

The same year Congress passed and Clinton passed the 1996 law on the reform of illegal immigration and the responsibility of immigrants.

"The laws of 96 have dramatically increased (…) the number of crimes for which you were deportable," said Doris Meissner, commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) of the United States. Clinton administration, which now estimates that these laws are "wholesale". went to the sea. "

But Meissner also said the context is important. Despite today's alarming rhetoric, warning Americans that caravans are breaking on the southern border, she says the border in the 1990s was much more porous than today.

"I am the one who presented to Congress the first proposal that included fencing and technology in 1994," said Meissner, who is now working at the Migration Policy Institute.

Jobs to civil rights

During the 1980s and 1990s, the main constituencies of the Democratic Party worried about the growth of the immigrant population.

"In particular, the labor movement was in the debate more restrictive and more anti-immigrant, for fear of seeing immigrants compete with American workers," said Cecilia Muñoz, head of immigration policy under the umbrella of the United States. Obama administration. But around the year 2000, things started to change. The NAACP considered immigration as a matter of civil rights rather than a direct threat to black workers, and the AFL-CIO reversed its positions.

For decades, union organizations feared that undocumented immigrants willing to work for less pay would lower union wages. But the AFL-CIO has begun to view immigrant labor as a growing number of members.

Yet, the problems of manpower persisted.

In 2007, when a majority of Democrats supported a bipartisan immigration bill, two progressives who are now considering a run for the presidency in 2020 have not done so.

"[Ohio Sen.] Sherrod Brown (…) thought that if we legalized and expanded the admission of immigrants, it could affect American workers in ways that would hurt workers in his state, "said Frank Sharry, a long-time activist. Date in favor of immigration leading the America's Reform Group of Immigration's Voice. "[Vermont Sen.] Bernie Sanders also voted against. "

Brown 's and Sanders' employees now claim that Senators have always been supportive of immigration and voted against the bill regarding humanitarian and trade union concerns, particularly with respect to the extension of the bill. a program of guest workers that they say would drive down wages.

But let's move on quickly until 2013, when the Senate voted on another comprehensive immigration bill. Groups of workers supported it and no Democrats voted against it.

At the time when immigration was widely perceived as a matter of manpower, Democrats were much more divided. But when leading trade union critics have abandoned their concerns, immigration has become a humanitarian and civil rights concern, and Democrats have become more unified.

Immigrants next door

Sharry thinks the biggest change he's noticed is a global shift in American public opinion.

"Over the past decade, Americans have become more deeply and deeply immersed because they know immigrants," he said. "Frankly, the driving force was made up of immigrants – who were well represented in the big cities of Los Angeles, New York, Houston, Chicago and Miami – who settled in all parts of the country."

And over the past two decades, this demographic shift has been magnified within the Democratic Party.

In 1995, about a quarter of the Democrats were not white. Today, 43% are people of color. Much of this growth in racial diversity has occurred among Americans of Asian and Latin American descent, while Asia and Latin America are the two most important sources of immigrant growth in the United States.

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But the impact of demographic change on political rhetoric is relatively recent.

The platform of the Democratic Party of 2008 spoke of the need to secure the borders of the country and to engage more customs officers and border protection, but in 2016 the platform does not spoke only of immigration law enforcement as far as they were to be "human".

The nascent 2020 democrat field is positioned in the same way.

When New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand served in the House of Representatives between 2007 and 2009, she wanted to expand deportations. while she is running for president, she wants to abolish ICE.

Last month on CNN, Gillibrand said that some of her previous positions on immigration were not "empathic".

"I realized that the things I had said were bad," she said. "I did not care about others, I did not fight for other people's children as I fought for my own."

There is one last explanation to the change of Democrats, it is the influence of the activists of the immigration.

"You have political figures who adopt the agenda of activists and their language," said Muñoz, who worked at the Obama White House. "The political leaders who listen to them focus only on some parts of the problem where activism is most glaring, for example the enforcement of immigration legislation."

She says it means that other important issues, such as the reform of the legal immigration process, are not receiving as much attention.

But the challenge of navigating a comprehensive debate is multiple. Like almost all political issues nowadays, Democrats agree that the intensity of the debate on immigration has intensified in direct response to President Trump.